this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/10062367

Apple Terminated Epic’s Developer Account

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[–] dojan@lemmy.world 142 points 6 months ago (11 children)

Lmao. I’ve no love for Apple, and even less for Epic. It’s like two grotesquely unlovable toddlers are throwing a hissy fit in their little sandbox and I’m here for it.

[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 92 points 6 months ago (6 children)

Yes, it's kind of funny with Epic complaining about fairness, when they arrange exclusivity agreements for their own game store. 🤪 And they actively sabotage it working on Linux.🤔

[–] deweydecibel@lemmy.world 39 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Regardless of the irony, someone needed to start this fight with Apple, so it might as well be them.

Between the two of them, I'm not willing to "support" either, but I'm slightly more inclined to hope Epic comes out on top because they're not also in a hardware dominance position. Epic can be as shitty as it likes about certain platforms, but they at least can only affect their games. They aren't gatekeepers to a massive audience of users, and by far one of the largest gates at that. The Epic store actually has competition.

Between an abusive developer and an abusive gatekeeper, the gatekeeper is the bigger issue.

[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 17 points 6 months ago

Regardless of the irony, someone needed to start this fight with Apple,

Absolutely.

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[–] Hubi@feddit.de 28 points 6 months ago (2 children)

The only sad thing about this is that only one of them can lose the lawsuit.

[–] h3mlocke@lemm.ee 8 points 6 months ago
[–] Cypher@lemmy.world 5 points 6 months ago

Ehhhh they could both throw endless millions at lawyers for no real result

[–] casmael@lemm.ee 19 points 6 months ago

fight fight fight fight fight fight

[–] stoly@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

But there is a satisfying FAFO aspect to this.

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[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 64 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (4 children)

Wow, they do this just 2 days after being fined $2 billion by EU!
Unless you don't know this "Tim Apple", those fines have a tendency to increase with repeated violations.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 40 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

They better increase quickly. Apple's bank account is large.

[–] Neato@ttrpg.network 10 points 6 months ago (2 children)

$2B on day one. Double that every instance. EU will own Apple in a week or two.

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[–] dojan@lemmy.world 10 points 6 months ago

Don’t tell him! Corporations being hit with massive fines is my kink!

[–] farcaster@lemmy.world 8 points 6 months ago (7 children)

$2 billion, that's 4 whole days of profits for them.

[–] Aux@lemmy.world 15 points 6 months ago

$2B is actually 2% of their profit. That's 7.3 days.

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[–] SinningStromgald@lemmy.world 37 points 6 months ago (13 children)

Sucks to be an iOS developer. Apple will never give up it's 30% of your money. EVER.

[–] JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee 37 points 6 months ago (17 children)

And the flat $100 fee, which disproportionately iffects small devs

[–] SkyezOpen@lemmy.world 32 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I took an app development course in college. Everything was android and I tested on my own device, except one project had to be on apple. I managed to snag an ancient iPhone off a friend to test, but no, turns out you need a dev account to even be able to load your own code on your phone. Fuck apple forever.

[–] reddig33@lemmy.world 11 points 6 months ago (5 children)

Dev accounts are free. It’s only when you want to post stuff to the store that you start paying.

[–] JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee 12 points 6 months ago (3 children)

You mean when you want to make it available to download in the only way Apple makes possible? It's not like you can just send the apk to someone to run on their iPhone, if you want to share the app with others on an iPhone, you have to use the Apple App Store, you have to pay them $100 + the cost of an Apple computer. Just to share your FOSS app with your friends.

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[–] phoneymouse@lemmy.world 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

Every other store charges 30% including Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, Google Play, etc. Epic doesn’t and they aren’t profitable, so I don’t know why people pile on Apple.

Edit: the downvotes are funny. Why? You don’t like someone pointing out the truth?

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[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 21 points 6 months ago

Thought it was just going to be one of those nothing burger cases where they only lost the license because someone forgot to renew something and was surprised that it actually isn't that.

Fuck Epic but they have a point.

[–] ryper@lemmy.ca 18 points 6 months ago (7 children)

Apple said one of the reasons they terminated our developer account only a few weeks after approving it was because we publicly criticized their proposed DMA compliance plan. Apple cited this X post from this thread written by Tim Sweeney. Apple is retaliating against Epic for speaking out against Apple’s unfair and illegal practices, just as they’ve done to other developers time and time again.

Epic breached the terms of its agreements with Apple and Google to kick off its lawsuits against them in 2020, and now that Sweeney is openly complaining about Apple's terms for third-party app stores Apple doesn't trust Epic not to breach those too. Seems reasonable.

[–] tigerjerusalem@lemmy.world 26 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Please clarify it to me because I read this debacle as Apple blackmailing developers HARD into not talking bad things about the company. I get they're evil and petty but I'm having a hard time to believe they're this childish and stupid, specially with the DMA knocking at their doors.

[–] ryper@lemmy.ca 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

This isn't some random developer, it's a developer that has already breached a contract with Apple. It's reasonable for Apple to be wary of entering into another contract with them when the CEO is publicly complaining about the terms.

There's definitely a case to be made that Epic shouldn't need an Apple developer account to make their own app store, but Apple is well within its rights to deny them an account based on their history.

[–] Tathas@programming.dev 13 points 6 months ago

I can just see them responding to the EU like, "Yeah, we'll allow other people to build app stores for iOS. They just need a dev account that we won't approve. That's not us specifically blocking alternate app stores though."

[–] deweydecibel@lemmy.world 21 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Seems reasonable.

Careful. There are quite a few terms of service that you've agreed to over the years that if certain aspects of them were enforced, you wouldn't think they were very reasonable.

I honestly don't know why there are so many people around here willing to back apple on this kind of shit. Who cares if they had the right to do it? The inherent problem here is that they had that right, when they really shouldn't.

[–] ryper@lemmy.ca 9 points 6 months ago

Careful. There are quite a few terms of service that you’ve agreed to over the years that if certain aspects of them were enforced, you wouldn’t think they were very reasonable.

Epic has an entire legal department to read over agreements like that, and yet they deliberately breached the terms. That's hugely different from someone unknowingly breaching a TOS that they didn't read.

[–] paraphrand@lemmy.world 5 points 6 months ago

We really need all TOS to be enforced fully so we can start pushing back on onerous TOS.

[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 6 points 6 months ago

"You did this just to start pushing for what's basically DMA so we think you'll violate us for the DMA again which is already under effect so we ban"?

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[–] mp3@lemmy.ca 10 points 6 months ago

I hope this come to bite them hard.

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